Take 2. FRIDAY'S GUIDE TO MOVIES & MUSIC.

Absurd `Seven' Is Penance For Talented Cast

September 22, 1995|By Michael Wilmington, Tribune movie critic.

In the bizarre new thriller "Seven," steady Morgan Freeman and mercurial Brad Pitt are cast as a pair of mismatched cops from different generations and races, with unlikely chemistry. They're obviously intended to approximate the appeal of the "Lethal Weapon" team of Danny Glover and Mel Gibson--and they do.

As William Somerset and David Mills, Manhattan detectives trying to find a serial killer with esoteric literary tastes, Freeman and Pitt are a good match for the Gibson-Glover boys. Freeman's owlish savvy and Pitt's twitchy cool make even the unlikeliest scenes ring with emotion and conflict.

Unfortunately, most of the scenes in "Seven" are unlikely, which means that by the end of the movie the duo is battling not just an insane killer but an off-the-wall screenwriter. It's a tossup who's putting Freeman and Pitt in more dangerous corners. After all, the serial killer is just shooting at them and strewing corpses in their paths--each body whimsically intended to illustrate one of the Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony. Greed. Sloth. Pride. Lust. Envy. Wrath. But screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker is putting hackneyed dialogue on their lips, impossible motivations in their souls.

Directed by David Fincher, the splashy visual stylist of "Alien 3" and numerous commercials, and shot by virtuoso cinematographer Darius Khondji (of "Delicatessen"), "Seven" is so visually stunning and dramatically puerile that it often thrills and exasperates simultaneously. The images and soundtrack create an overpowering atmosphere of urban blight, a city in decay. The crumbling walls, dark rooms and streets awash in rain all make a nifty modern equivalent for the stylized shadows of film noir. But the story is the kind of witless thriller-fable--derived almost wholly from other movies and TV--that can't suspend our disbelief, or even make a dent in it.

As the detectives puzzle over the stream of victims coming their way in Somerset's last week on the force--and Mills' first in his new assignment--a pattern emerges. A fat man tied to his kitchen chair. An avaricious lawyer with a pound of flesh sliced off. A lazy layabout tied to his bed. A sex maniac.

What does it mean? If we're not as well-read as bookworm Somerset--who scours through "The Canterbury Tales" and Dante's "Divine Comedy" as the plot thickens--the killer thoughtfully leaves clues to the seven sins scrawled in blood on the walls.

There's an Eighth Deadly Sin wreaking more damage here than the others put together: poor script judgment. Why waste actors like Freeman, Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow--who plays Mills' wife--on material like this? In the fetid gloom of this movie, the plot just seems loonier the more it unwinds and the graphic bloody squalor more deeply unpleasant.

Imagine a movie about a serial killer who ties an obese man to his chair and feeds him pieces of the kitchen floor. Imagine a movie where dozens of SWAT team commandos and cops burst into a dilapidated apartment, point their guns at a figure on a bed--and then reel backward from the stench that suddenly arises when they pull off the single sheet covering him. (They couldn't smell anything before? That's some sheet.) Imagine an insane murderer who regularly slices skin off his fingertips so he won't leave fingerprints.

"Seven" is obviously attacking the voguish moralism of the times. But the strangest thing about this movie may be the way it tries to uphold literacy. William Somerset--whose name may be a nod to W. Somerset Maugham--is presented as wise because he reads and can quote Hemingway. Mills is a tyro because he relies on Cliffs Notes. But how many times are these cops going to be confronted with murders planned by literary allusions? Outside of Ellery Queen novels, those aren't exactly everyday crimes.

And "Seven" isn't an everyday movie. (It even includes a mystery star actor--who does a terrific job as "John Doe," the serial killer--whom the studio pressbook asks critics to avoid identifying.) It's a misfire--but a fascinating, magnetic misfire, a film full of first-rate talents forced into absurdity, struggling to bring believability to nonsense. Is that the Ninth Deadly Sin?

``SEVEN''

(star) (star) 1/2

Directed by David Fincher; written by Andrew Kevin Walker; photographed by Darius Khondji; edited by Richard Francis-Bruce; production designed by Arthur Max; music by Howard Shore; produced by Arnold Kopelson, Phyllis Carlyle. A New Line Cinema release; opens Friday at The Biograph, Burnham Plaza, Esquire, Lincoln Village and outlying. Running time: 2:07. MPAA rating: R. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.